{"id":453913,"date":"2026-02-02T16:40:09","date_gmt":"2026-02-02T16:40:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/453913\/"},"modified":"2026-02-02T16:40:09","modified_gmt":"2026-02-02T16:40:09","slug":"nrl-news-2026-nicho-hynes-weight-change-cronulla-sharks-season-indigenous-all-stars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/453913\/","title":{"rendered":"NRL news 2026 | Nicho Hynes weight change, Cronulla Sharks season; Indigenous All-Stars"},"content":{"rendered":"

Nicho Hynes<\/a> has confirmed there has been a slight change to his frame as he tries to change Cronulla<\/a>‘s fortunes from consistent finalists into premiership winners.<\/p>\n

Since Craig Fitzgibbon started as coach in 2022, the Sharks have finished 2nd, 6th, 4th and 5th but haven’t gone past a preliminary final<\/a>.<\/p>\n

As the halfback, Hynes has been the main man for all those seasons, but hasn’t been able to deliver the side to the promised land.<\/p>\n

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To address any shortcomings in the halves, the 29-year-old has decided to add to his size. <\/p>\n

“I feel like I could take my game to a better level if I carried an extra kilogram of muscle and take the line on a bit more than I have over the previous years,” he said on 9news Sydney.<\/p>\n

“That’s a strength of mine and I want to play to my strengths and hopefully I can do that.”<\/p>\n

Hynes finished last year with his lowest average running metres since the 2020 season with Melbourne when he played 11 matches.<\/p>\n

Overall he ran for more metres last year than he did the previous season though, finishing with 2,417.<\/p>\n

On the other side of his game, Hynes stated that last year was his “best defensive year”, having tackled at 91.15 per cent efficiency.<\/p>\n

That season he finished with the most tackles he’s made on 628. His previous best was 514 in that first year with the Sharks.<\/p>\n

Hynes promised his defence will only get better.<\/p>\n

“That’s what I’ve built my game off,” he said.<\/p>\n

“That got me into games and I feel like a lot of teams target the halves and I was making up to 30 tackles a game sometimes and I want to make sure every single time a back-rower ran at me that I was making it, and they felt it as well.”<\/p>\n

Hynes confirmed he will play for the Indigenous All-Stars vs Maori All-Stars on February 15.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Nicho Hynes has confirmed there has been a slight change to his frame as he tries to change…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":453914,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[568],"tags":[64,63,761,762,158,85],"class_list":["post-453913","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nrl","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-national-rugby-league","tag-nationalrugbyleague","tag-nrl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/453913","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=453913"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/453913\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/453914"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=453913"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=453913"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=453913"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}